S.e.A.rCh

Search Engine Strategies Day 2

Oh man, what a day! So I got up this morning, concerned about my first conference presentation at SES London 2009. I spent the morning prepping at home – given this was my first time, I really wanted to be prepared. I left the flat at 12.20ish, planning to get the 12.49 from Brighton to London Victoria. My plan was to arrive in London at 2ish, 30 mins across London to Islington, and then arrive at the Business Design Centre at 3pm, an hour in advance of my speaking slot. What a mistake!

The train got stopped got short of East Croydon (I think), where we waited for 20 or so minutes. We were told there had been an incident, which transpired to be this. The train then got reversed to Purley, where we were told there were no further services to London. Bizarrely, the platform where we got dropped off had no clear exit, leaving many to leapfrog over a 5-foot fence to make their way toward the taxi rank. I joined 3 others in their bid to hit central London, and we started on a journey towards Fenchurch Street. Despite the driver’s best back street knowledge, progress was slow, so I decided to leap out of the taxi at Brixton, and progressed onward via the Tube.

I hit Islington at 3.15 (bearing in mind I was talking at 4pm) and legged it towards the Business Design Centre, which I reached at 3.30ish. Bearing in mind this was my first conference engagement, this was not the start that I wanted.  The staff at the Business Design Centre were fantastic, and did so much to make me feel at home.  I met up with Kevin, who helped me get settled, and I uploaded my presentation to the podium.

Set-back number 2 – A colleague had warned me that my version of Powerpoint may be incompatible with everyone elses version of Powerpoint (iCrossing are pretty technologically advanced!), so I made a concerted effort to save it as an older version (97-2003, ppt extension I believe).  So I uploaded my presentation to the podium, and guess what – everything was wrong!

We got the IT dudes in pretty sharpish, and realised the best thing to do was to run everything through my laptop.  Only thing was, I hadn’t prepped my desktop, and I’m a bit of renegade in terms of the way I work – I have no firm structure to my day to day work, so everything is saved to my desktop.  Funny thing is, it looks like as the IT dudes were trying to sort out my presentation, someone may have picked up on this.  Maybe this wasn’t aimed at me, I don’t know, but the funny thing is that my desktop is full of analysis that I don’t think a single thing displayed was related to any of our clients.  In fact, the big thing that I was worried about anyone seeing was a file called “sleep cat”:

The only other bit of negative commentary I picked up was regarding press releases.  Again, I’m not sure if this was in response to my presentation, but we’re seeing it having a positive impact, and if you delve a bit deeper, you can see some big industry players making use of it.  My personal feeling is that they’re not devalued in terms of SEO quite yet.

So day 3 beckons.  I’ve not made the most of conference so far – I’d like to hook up with Richard Baxter, Andrew Girdwood, Dave Naylor and Debra Mastaler (again) tomorrow.  If you see me wandering around, come say hello – I’ll be looking for all of you!  Even if you’re not one of these, I’m looking to meet anyone willing to talk SEO, so please say hello!  Looking forward to London SEO tomorrow night – see you all then if not before!

Tags: ses london 2009